French AI company Mistral has secured $830 million in debt financing to support its development of data centres across Europe.
The loan will initially be used to expand Mistral’s flagship data centre south of Paris by purchasing an additional 13,800 Nvidia GPUs, bringing its total capacity to 44 megawatts.
The financing was backed by Bpifrance, BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, Natixis CIB, La Banque Postale, HSBC and MUFG.
Since its launch in 2023, Mistral has raised almost €2.8 billion and reached a valuation of €11.7 billion, while annual revenues have jumped to over €348 million, the Financial Times reported in February.
The company is Europe’s largest AI developer and an increasingly important part of the continent’s push for sovereign AI. Chief executive Arthur Mensch noted this in his comment on the financing, saying that “Scaling our infrastructure in Europe is critical to empower our customers and to ensure AI innovation and autonomy remain at the heart of Europe.
“We will continue to invest in this area, given the surging and sustained demand from governments, enterprises and research institutions seeking to build their own customised AI environment, rather than depend on third-party cloud providers.”
Last month, the company announced a €1.2 billion investment in digital infrastructure in Sweden, including the construction of new data centres. It aims to secure 200 megawatts of AI compute across Europe by the end of 2027.
Despite its importance to the continent, and its high-profile partnerships – including with HSBC – Mistral still lags behind US-based AI giants like OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of valuation and funding. In their most recent fundraising rounds, the pair raised $110 billion and $30 billion respectively against valuations that put each company in the hundreds of billions.
